[ix400]

Until a few years ago we couldn't do any hardware decoding on Mac OS X because Apple wouldn't open up the API. Even now the API is still mostly closed. I believe (but I do not know for sure) that this is the problem with interlaced content being handled by hardware decoding.

There's only two options at this point: One is use a Broadcom Crystal HD chip inside the mini (replaces your internal wifi chip, so you'll need to get USB wifi if you want wifi). The other option is to kidnap an Apple employee/developer and force them to tell you the secrets of Apple's HW decoding APIs.

You can also just turn Hardware decoding off. The CPU will handle it just fine, and software decoding tends to have a little bit better quality (or so I'm told. I have not done any "scientific" tests personally). You do have a very powerful i5 in there, after all.

Hi Ned,

thanks for your answer.

The thing is that the Mini gets a bit noisy when the CPU is doing all the work.

Within XBMC, wouldn't it be a good idea then if XBMC - in the case it 'finds' 1080i material - just automatically ignores the hardware acceleration switch in the settings in order to avoid a crash? This would be really helpful.

Otherwise I always have to know before starting play back of a file if it contains interlaced material or not... Basically, this makes HW acceleration useless then, at least when you have a mix of 1080i / 1080p files in your collection. You'll never know if your next playback attempt will crash XBMC or not.

Chris